The late Congresswoman Pat Schroeder once answered the insulting question of how could she be a member of Congress and a mother with ‘I have a brain and a uterus and they both work.’ This was before the Internet, so there were no Cafe Press t-shirts produced celebrating that quote. Despite the lack of swag, the quote inspired me as a young woman and still does. Sadly, not very many other people agree with me.
To the Right Wing, only my uterus matters, and my brain is a complete waste of tissue to them. This view goes back to Aristotle, especially as expressed by Thomas Aquinas:
Summa Theologica Ia Question 92, answer1, Reply to Objection 1: As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material defect, or even from some external influence; such as that of a south wind, which is moist, as the Philosopher [Aristotle] observes (De Gener. iv, 2). On the other hand, as regards human nature in general, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature's intention as directed to the work of generation.
Aquinas thought that women were nothing but a means to produce more males. That remains the Right Wing’s opinion of women. Yenor flatly states that women don’t belong in the professions and praises state laws that kept women out of ‘manly’ jobs. Women’s brains are useless in his preferred world.
Nobody demonstrates this fact better than The women they use to spread their toxic message. Amy Wellborn argues in that piece that transgender-affirming medicine is a bad thing because women are nothing but our wombs. Once the birth control pill was legalized, there was no difference between men and women and men win. “(We) Gender critical feminists reject “gender” as anything real, and insist that all that matters is sex, which is binary and cannot be changed, and just is. We won’t use “preferred pronouns,” for example, for to do so, isn’t at all “kind,” but is a demand that I reject reality in favor of your beliefs.”
“Sex . . . Just is.” She doesn’t mean sex in the biological sense of having larger or smaller germ cells. If that were all she meant by the immutability of sex, I would have no disagreement with her. In fact, Wellborn is part of a movement that believes that the size of one’s germ cells dictates every single life choice a person will ever make. Women are, in her world, entirely subject to our uteruses and our minds are a waste of space. She wouldn’t put in that honestly, but that is the essence of conservative opinion about women.
Pregnancy and lactation are physical processes, with no mental components whatsoever. The ability to gestate and lactate makes us placental mammals, nothing else. We’re not even that good at either activity: rats give birth every 21 days and there’s an entire industry devoted to cattle lactation. Coma patients can gestate and lactate. The part of us that makes us unique and human is not connected at all to our ovaries or mammary glands, and praising women for having functioning reproductive systems denigrates the truly human part of us.
Creativity is the essence of being human. Anthropologists distinguish ancient human sites from other animals by the presence of tools and, especially, art. Dorothy L Sayers said, in “The Mind of the Maker,” that humans are the most like God when we join with Him in creating new things. ‘Creation’ in her work was making concrete an idea, using our minds and hands; it was far, far more than gestation. Depriving women of the ability to take ideas and make them concrete in the world is depriving us of humanity and giving us only gross, animal instinct in its place, just like Aquinas — a celibate male living only with other men — thought.
Giving physical motherhood the priority is insulting to our children as well. If my sons ever produce anything amazing, it will be entirely theirs and I deserve NO credit for it. My role in their achievements is simply to stay out of their way. The conservative view that families are more important than individual people is the worst kind of socialism in that it takes achievement away from the actual achiever and gives it to those who did none of the hard work required for that achievement. Mothers don’t get to claim any credit unless they actually used their minds and bodies for concrete, identifiable parts of the work.
Obviously, the view that women are nothing but the matter to be used to make more males produces opinions about public policy. The most obvious ones are moves to ban contraception and abortion. After all, if women are nothing but our uteruses, best to get as much work out of those as possible. All advocacy for ‘traditional’ marriage and ‘‘Natalism’ stems from this position. What I want to emphasize, however, is that women deserve the right to be human in the best sense: to use our minds to create something. Even if exercising our capacity to create means we have fewer children or spend less time with them, we have that right! Our brains work quite as well as our uteruses.